deformation and flow

deformation and flow, in physics, alteration in shape or size of a body under the influence of mechanical forces. Flow is a change in deformation that continues as long as the force is applied.

A brief treatment of deformation and flow follows. For full treatment, see mechanics.

Everyday substances are ordinarily classed as either solids, liquids, or gases, and, under normal circumstances, gases and liquids flow relatively freely and solids deform when they are subjected to forces. Most solids initially deform elastically; that is to say, they return to their original shape when the load is removed. Rigid materials such as metals, concrete, or rocks sustain large forces while undergoing little deformation, but if sufficiently large forces are applied, the materials can no longer sustain them by elastic deformation alone. What happens then depends upon the internal structure of the material. As greater and greater force is applied to a brittle substance, such as a block of rock or concrete, a point will be reached at which the internal structure can no longer sustain the applied load by elastic deformation alone. Thereupon, the specimen will quite suddenly fracture. This behaviour is characteristic of brittle materials: the transition from an integral specimen to a broken one occurs almost instantaneously and with little or no warning.

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sedimentary rock: Deformation structures

For a ductile material, such as mild steel or aluminum, after the initial period of elastic deformation, the same critical point—the specimen’s limit of elastic deformability—is reached. In this case, however, the material, instead of fracturing, accommodates itself to the applied forces by rearranging its internal structure. The result is plastic deformation, which will continue as long as the forces are applied. The material gives the impression of flowing under the applied loads, and this flow is plastic, since, if the load is removed, the specimen retains its deformation. Eventually, plastic flow will come to an end: deformation will ultimately tend to concentrate in one area, which will break.

This ability of ductile materials to flow plastically under load is fundamental to their usefulness in engineering. As a consequence, an understanding of plastic flow is vital in technology, particularly in the production of large numbers of objects in a variety of complex shapes. Plastic flow is also a central factor in the attempts to understand the movement and flow of rocks under conditions of high temperature and pressure that make them behave like ductile materials. Such processes have shaped the surface of the Earth, although the time scale (millions of years) is quite different from that of ordinary interest to engineers.

The simple classification of materials as solids, liquids, or gases can now, on the basis of correlating submicroscopic structure with mechanical properties, be expanded into a more sophisticated set of structural types, as follows:

Gases have randomly moving molecules that do not attract one another, whose velocity is dependent upon the gas temperature, and that collide as if they were elastic spheres of negligible volume. These assumptions are the basis of the kinetic theory of gases, which predicts that the product of the pressure and the volume, divided by the absolute temperature, is a constant. Most gases conform quite well to this relationship over a remarkably wide range of conditions.

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Liquids have molecules that are in contact but are capable of sliding over one another effortlessly. No shear stresses can exist in such a “perfect fluid.” (Shear stresses involve the energy dissipated as adjacent planes of molecules slide across one another, as in the action of a card player spreading a pack of cards across a table.) Water, the most common liquid of all, has properties quite close to those of a perfect fluid.

Viscous liquids consist of molecules that, like those of the perfect fluid, are in contact with one another but do exert forces on one another so that shearing motions within the liquid are resisted. These internal shearing forces produce the characteristic behaviour of liquids such as treacle, heavy oils, or molten plastics. This characteristic motion, known as shearing flow, is an energy-dissipative process. For comparison, the viscosity of glycerine (a viscous fluid) at room temperature is 15 poise (the unit of viscosity), compared with 0.01 for water and 1.8 × 10⁻⁴ for air. (See fluid mechanics.)

Linearly elastic solids have molecules envisaged as being locked together by springlike elastic forces. For small deformations, a graph of deformation as a function of the applied load is a straight line. This type of deformation is an energy-storing process, as exemplified by the compression of a spring. (See elasticity; Hooke’s law.) Under greater deformation, such elastic solids exhibit either brittleness (in which the internal elastic forces are broken down) or ductility (in which certain internal mechanisms permit shearing displacements to occur within the atomic structure). For materials with a crystalline structure, these shearing displacements are usually associated with defects within the crystal lattice. Such defects are called dislocations, and they give a crystalline structure the ability to sustain plastic deformations without fracturing. In materials science, a study of the role of dislocations in plastic flow constitutes a major research activity.

Viscoelastic solids have molecules in which the load-deformation relationship is time-dependent. If a load is suddenly applied to such a material and then kept constant, the resulting deformation is not achieved immediately. Rather, the solid gradually deforms and attains its steady-state deformation only after a significant period of time. This behaviour is called creep. Conversely, the sudden application of a fixed deformation to such a material produces initial stresses that can be very large; these stresses then slowly relax to a steady-state value as the material accommodates itself to the applied deformation. Such a procedure is known as a stress-relaxation test. The physical reasons for this behaviour are too complex to be explained by any simple molecular model. Such behaviour is characteristic of glass, rubber, many plastics, and some metals.

Plastic solids are materials, such as lead, in which the extent of elastic behaviour is either minute or nonexistent. In such materials, any deformation induced is permanent.

The above categories cover the behaviour of most engineering and naturally occurring materials, although it may sometimes be difficult to place a given substance in any one category. Alternatively, a material may be allocated to one category at room temperature and to another at higher temperatures. Time scales are also relevant to the categorization of materials. For example, rocks, which may be effectively characterized as elastic solids for normal engineering purposes, would have to be reclassified as viscoelastic solids in geologic studies in which the time scale may be millions of years.

Finally, there are a growing number of very odd, synthetic substances exhibiting extraordinary properties that do not accord with any of the categories described above.